Trip Report: Elk Hunting in Colorado

[OrigamiSensei]

Definitely a tl;dr type of post but some of my fellow denizens in the micros have asked and hopefully some of you will find it to be a diverting read. I hope the images don't blow out your screens.

Friday - The day after I arrived we went up to our base camp that had been set up at 9700 feet of elevation in a national forest on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. While the sleeping and supply tents were already set up we still had to set up the "fly" tarp that covered our cooking area. After we got that done I went out for a few hours to scout out the immediate area. Our camp was located a short distance from the top of a ridge that extended roughly two miles to the west and then dropped off. A bit downslope from the top of the ridge and paralleling it was a closed logging road that provided easier access by foot. This was where many of us did quite a bit of hunting for the week. For the most part the ridge was forested by spruce trees but at the place where the ridge started to drop off there was an open meadow, then more spruce forest and then things opened up into meadows interspersed by "quakies" (quaking aspen trees). All three spots appeared to afford the possibility for good hunting so that's where I decided to spend the next day.

Our camp


Saturday - That morning we got up and headed out the logging road before daylight. I dropped off at the first open meadow while one of the other hunters kept going beyond me past the end of the spruce and down into the valley at the end of the ridge. I hadn't fully noticed the day before because I was in just a jacket with no rifle and only walking along a road, but the altitude was really affecting my endurance. Two miles of walking is nothing at sea level but at 10000 feet carrying a rifle and all the things needed for a hunt along with wearing many layers of heavy clothes it can be downright tiring. Thus, when I started climbing the ridge my lack of physical fitness was really showing. Grateful to get to my first hunting location, I selected the spot for my first "sit". I checked the safety one more time on my Remington 760, a plain but trusty pump-action .30-'06 equipped with a 3-9X scope, and settled in to watch for daylight, which was occurring around seven in the morning at that time.

I had planned on doing a number of two to three-hours sits during the day, so I moved to my second spot around 9:30. The second spot I selected was in the spruce trees between the two open areas along a game trail. Because it was a weekend day we were hoping that there would be more hunters about and that they would move the animals around for us. After an uneventful stay I moved again at about 11:30 to the edge of the open area. This spot allowed me to stay in the trees while watching the open space out in front of me. I had good coverage of two draws and a fair amount of shooting range.

I had an interesting incident during this stint when at some point I noticed a flicker of movement at my feet. Much to my surprise it was a mosquito, forlornly attempting to gain altitude but unable to get more than half an inch off the snow cover. It had snowed earlier in the week and because I was hunting on the north side of the ridge the snow had not completely melted. Let's just say my sympathy for the mosquito was limited because, well, mosquitos suck - both literally and figuratively. After several hours there I returned in reverse sequence to the locations of my first two sits to finish out the day. As the sun descended I was treated to a view that extended at least fifty miles, to the majestic 12000-14000 foot peaks off to the north. When the sun went below the horizon I started the trudge back to camp. It started to get dark a little quicker than I expected but since I was on a road the whole way navigation was not an issue. When I got back I found out I was the last guy in and that the guys had wondered where I got to because a bad weather front was moving in.

A Remington 760 Gamemaster similar to mine


Saturday night - I got in just as the weather turned. It started with freezing rain, shortly accompanied by a completely unexpected bout of thunder and lightning in close proximity. Now ordinarily I have zero fear of thunderstorms, but our camp was rather exposed and at 10000 feet you're two miles closer to the action than you would be at sea level. That was a bit stressful as the storm crashed around us. Meanwhile, as we had dinner and retired to the tent the hunter who had gone past me shared his story. He had seen a 5x5 bull elk standing facing straight on to him at less than 100 yards and when he fired his .338 Winchester magnum the elk dropped. Since the .338 is such a potent rifle and nothing he had ever shot with it before had ever gotten back up he assumed his job was done; besides, he didn't want to mess up any more meat than was necessary. He turned around to gather his stuff and when he turned back around the elk had gotten up and was leaving the vicinity. Unable to get another shot off, he tracked that elk for several miles down into the valley before losing the trail when it started up a bare south-facing slope that had no snow. The best we can figure is that the shot ricocheted off of some bone without hitting any vitals. Unfortunately this is one of the downsides that can happen when hunting despite best efforts; there's no worse feeling than wounding an animal and losing it. We're all hoping the wound was light and that the bull elk makes it.

As night progressed the temperature continued to fall, reaching a low of around 6 degrees Fahrenheit while snow fell and collected on the tent roof. There wasn't any problem with people sleeping through a tent collapse because it was so cold we could hardly sleep, even with a propane heater going and having winter grade army surplus mummy bags to sleep in. Of course, one problem with a mummy bag is that how effective it is sort of depends on how big you are. At six feet and 250 pounds with broad shoulders I could only get the mummy bag closed so far and I tried to fill in the rest of the gap by sleeping in two pairs of socks, my hunting pants and a t-shirt with a sweatshirt and a fleece on over it. Then, where the mummy bag wasn't covering me I tried to fill in the gap with my hunting parka. It didn't work very well so I had no problem taking turns knocking the snow off the roof of the tent despite have to leave the slightly lessened frozenness of my sleeping bag.

Snowfall at our campsite


Sunday - As one can imagine we felt no particular need to get up before sunrise, although we did get up around daybreak. During the night roughly 12-15 inches of snow had fallen. It had collapsed our fly tarp for the dining area and snow had drifted in over everything not in a tent. We had to dig out our propane stoves to get coffee going and had shoveling and cleanup to do. We also had to repair and rehang the fly tarp where the grommets had ripped out from the weight of the snow. Along about 9AM four of us intrepid souls decided we'd give hunting a shot despite the fact that snow was still falling. As we trekked out the road I made the sad discovery that if I thought I was tired from the day before, trying to walk through 15 inches of snow was even more exhausting. Much in the fashion that geese rotate their leaders to break the air resistance at the front of their vee formation we were rotating the lead duties of breaking trail through the snow.

About halfway out the trail disaster struck, and it was completely my fault. After many years of hunting antelope in Wyoming in quite benign weather I thought that the hunting equipment and clothing I had acquired would suffice for this trip. Sadly, I was wrong. As I noted, snow was still falling and I was lacking scope caps for my rifle. At one of our rest points, we decided to improvise a plastic cover for at least one end of my scope from a bread loaf wrapper one of the other guys was carrying for his sandwich. As I cutting the wrapper my cold and stiff fingers fumbled and I basically wound up trying to cut my thumb off with a big, nasty and very sharp six-inch Buck knife blade. As I bled copiously onto the snow I realized my day was done and that I'd need to get myself back to camp for some first aid. With a finely tuned sense of irony I recognized that I was wrapping my sliced digit with paper towels that were meant to help me clean up blood that got on my hands from gutting an elk. Becoming progressively more tired, cold and miserable I plodded my way back to camp leaving an occasional blood trail in the snow as the paper towels soaked through.

When I reached camp my father and his best friend did not answer my calls but two of our other hunters who were in another tent did. Fortunately we had good first aid supplies available and we got my thumb wrapped up with a generous dose of anti-bacterial ointment, a bandage and some gauze wrapping. I'm happy to report that the trip passed with no infection and no trouble from my injury, so all turned out well. I will, however, have a nice little scar to remind me to be more careful when playing with knives in the future. I spent the rest of the day helping to shovel and help get the camp back in order, and also spent time hanging out with my father and his best friend. My dad and his buddy have been best friends for something like fifty years, and is essentially his "brother from another mother", like family to us. I had not been hunting with my dad and his friend for three years, and I didn't get to see them this summer like I usually do so getting some time together was good. We had some worry on Sunday evening as darkness came and our three hunters had not returned. We kept getting more and more worried as time wore on until the exhausted troupe finally dragged in sometime after eight o'clock.

Sunday night was another frosty cold one like the previous night - but, ah, this night we had some additional weaponry. My father pulled out his stash of handwarmer packets, the type where you tear the packet open and shake it. The packets are filled with some sort of powdery chemicals that react with air and create heat for eight to ten hours. I also came more to grips with the mummy bag and figured out that if I kept the opening more toward eight or nine o'clock on a clock face instead of twelve and continued to shield the opening with my parka that my situation was much improved. Combining this with the presence of the handwarmer in the upper body area I was still somewhat cold, but at least I wasn't freezing miserable.

Monday - It remained cold and again nobody felt the need to get up and head out until daylight. My thumb was in good shape and I decided to return to the area where I had hunted on Saturday. Unfortunately, once again the lack of proper equipment jumped up and bit me. In this case it was my boots. I had noted the problem during the previous days but for various reasons it was manageable; on this day my feet were flat out freezing. The boots were uninsulated and had a steel shank. As a result the steel shank would rapidly cool when standing in the snow and effectively cold-soak my boots to the point where three pairs of socks couldn't keep up. By roughly one o'clock I could not feel my feet anymore and because my feet were so cold it was affecting the rest of my body as well. There was no way I was going to make it to the end of the day so I packed it in and headed sheepishly back to camp.

Some of the other hunters had decided to use the day for rest and camp reorganization after the snow. In the late afternoon four of them headed back down the mountain to our host's house to pick up some supplies and get showers. Since I knew I'd be going down the next day I asked them to retrieve my Blackberry and fire it up to retrieve my emails. That way I could work on replies and then fire things out the next day. When I got my Blackberry that evening I noticed some emails about schools closures and mentions of a fire.

Tuesday - That morning my dad, his best friend and I headed down the mountain to resupply and get cleaned up. As soon as I got into cell phone range I started getting more emails and I called my wife. It was at that point that I learned the enormity of the fire situation as my wife proceeded to have a mini-meltdown on the phone. While our house was not in danger there were fires surrounding our community, from near the coast to the north and in a rough semi-circle ringing around us all the way to the east and then the south. A good friend of my wife had been evacuated and was staying at our house and I spent the morning checking in with some co-workers as well, both of whom had been evacuated. Fortunately everybody seems to have gotten through okay but it was a very scary time and a lot of people suffered in those fires. We've been through some bad fire seasons before in 1998 and 2003 but this was the worst in the time I've lived in San Diego.

Meanwhile I had other lesser problems I needed to solve. A stop at Wal-Mart yielded a pair of warm rubber boots with 1200 grams of Thinsulate, some thermal underwear, a better pair of gloves and a couple more pairs of hunting pants. That solved my cold problems quite effectively for the rest of the week. I checked in with work to make sure there were no job-related disasters that would force me to cut my hunting trip short and took care of what needed to be done. After taking a much-needed shower and cleaning up we were ready to head back up the mountain.

Wednesday - It was back out the road at daylight, and my plan was to try and sit quietly most of the day and see what came by. As it turned out I sat all day in a good looking spot a short distance past where the spruce trees ended and I had a good view off bot sides of the ridge and into a couple of draws. The new boots made a huge difference, to the point where my socks were wet from sweating inside the boots. I wasn't complaining, though and had the chance to sun dry my socks since the weather was gorgeous that day. As the day wore into afternoon the temperature warmed to to around 50 degrees and I was able to take off my parka and enjoy the sunshine and spectacular view of the Rockies out in the distance. The one problem with all that lovely sunshine was that I had forgotten to bring my sunscreen along that day and I wound up with a pretty good burn, as the snow cover reflected the sunlight up under my hat into my face.

At around four o'clock I had a surprise visitor as a porcupine ambled up to within 20 feet of me, completely oblivious to my presence. He then proceeded to climb a pine tree that was less than ten yards away. At some point he wised up to the fact I was there and must have gotten worried, as he stayed at the top of the tree until after I left. In the meantime we whiled away the remaining daytime hours companionably until the sun set and I returned to camp. When I got back I found out my dad had seen a nice bull elk at about 400 yards but he only had a cow license so he couldn't do anything but watch.

The road


Thursday - On Thursday four of us decided to try a different location and took a truck ride from camp to our jumping off point. To get to our hunting spot we had to climb one ridge, then descend it and cross a small valley, then make a fairly steep climb up another ridge and work our way out the ridge spine a distance before dropping down towards the next valley. I split the day into three sits, dropping progressively further down in as there were more indications of elk sign as I kept descending. At the end of the day we met back at the second point, where I noticed a dead tree stump with a rather unusual feature: if you looked at it from the right direction it looked exactly like a coyote howling at the moon. I decided we needed to call the place "Coyote Point". Meanwhile, the other guys shared their stories. It turns out that the area was being hunted by men on horses, and had probably been for the past several days. As a result it looked like the elk had decided to move elsewhere, although it was certainly good elk country. As we made our way back to the truck the elevation and lack of physical fortitude hit again, and at one point took a pretty good tumble while making our way out due to exhaustion. I swore I was going to take it easier the next day.

As the evening set the moon rose once again. The next night was going to be the full moon and while it was absolutely beautiful and allowed us to make our way back to camp more easily at night it was also a cause for our difficulty in finding elk. Elk are often active at dawn and dusk, and when the moon is sufficiently bright as it was here they can do all their feeding at night and lie low during the day.

Our elusive prey


Friday - So of course I took it easier, right? Uh, no. It turned out that one of the guys wanted to hunt alone in a particular place, my dad and his best friend were pairing up and two other very close friends were pairing up. That left me and the mountain goat of the group and he had a place he wanted to try. I figured I'd join him since what I was doing so far wasn't working. We drove the truck to the jump off point and were heading out before daylight. The problem in hunting with the stud of the group is that he looks for the highest local elevation and decides that by golly, that's where he's headed.

Off we went across meadows and we started working our way up a curving ridge that led around to that highest point and overlooked a ton of prime elk country. We finally made our way to the peak around lunchtime. Towards the top we were working our way along the spine but the spine got extremely narrow and on the right hand side featured a precipitous 50 or 60 degree dropoff into a bowl while along the left side it was steep but not as steep and navigable. We looked at each other and said "we're dropping off onto the side a little". We made our way to a point just off the peak on the open, grassy side slope. In doing so we were afforded a stunning 180 degree panoramic view of the Rockies out in front of us, and so enjoyed our lunch lounging in the grass somewhere above 10,000 feet with a view we had richly earned. It just about killed me getting there but as I confessed to my hunting companion, it was well worth it.

From that point we were able to look over square miles of meadows and elk country but much to our amazement we didn't see any elk, even at distances well beyond rifle range. Those crafty creatures, where did they go? The remainder of the day was spent working our way down in elevation, continuing in a large circle. We made our way into some thicker stands of spruce in hopes of catching an elk by surprise. During that day we could tell by the fresh tracks and the urgency (kicked up dirt) that we had jumped single elk on three separate occasions, but we never saw them. That night we all sat around the campfire and made Jiffy-Pop popcorn. I haven't done that in many years so it was fun to rekindle some childhood memories.

Elk Country


Saturday - It was our last day hunting and we were all perturbed that we were getting skunked. We decided to make one last foray as a group out the ridge to see what happened, and while it was a very nice day it was as unsuccessful as all the previous ones. We were all out before daylight and I went back to the first opening area where I had found a super spot that overlooked the open area but also back along a good elk and deer trail. I had high hopes for seeing something during the dawn sit, but nothing happened. The rest of the day was spent on a couple of other sits in the area. The day turned out to be futile yet again for the whole party, and we ended our hunting efforts with no elk to show for it.

Sunday - Alas, the time had come to tear down camp and break up our intrepid little band of hunters. The dining area was packed away and the fly tarp came down pretty quickly. In short order we had taken down the two supply tents and the small sleeping tent as well. It took longer for us to take care of the large sleeping tent since there was quite a bit of moisture in the tent and we were trying to air it out. After giving it a couple of hours we finally declared it good enough and finished the job of packing. We said farewell to the camp shortly after noontime and headed down the mountain back to our routines.

Final thoughts - Regardless of one's stance on hunting I hope this shows there is a lot more to these sorts of hunting trips than the simple desire to kill an animal and get some meat. Don't get me wrong, I had every intention of coming home with elk meat and that goal is what drives the efforts, but the best memories one carries away are often of the little things. I got to take some time away from the noisy world and sit quietly for once. I could think, I could give myself a rest from the concerns of the world, I could revel in the glories of nature. Let me tell you, it's therapeutic to sit and watch the squirrels and chipmunks scampering as they gather food for the winter, to listen to the birds chatter and the hawks soar, to watch the sun and moon rise and set in their celestial rhythms.

Not in a jerkish or neanderthal way, it's also a way to reconnect with one's manhood, to pit oneself against cold and exhaustion and test the limits. Yes, I'm getting older and I'm out of shape but I pushed myself further than I ever would have thought possible. Summoning that mental strength to push harder and farther translates to a renewed confindence in my ability to push myself harder in other situations as well. Then there's the cameraderie of the group. I got to spend time with my father and his best friend and sitting around the campfire trading tall stories is far more entertaining than sitting in the living room watching the latest piece of dreck on television. I may not have brought any meat home but it was certainly a successful trip.

[Fishwhenican]

Nice trip report!! I really enjoyed reading it.

Elk hunting is pretty special, especially way up in the mountains. It is amazing how little Oxygen there is at higher elevations, especially when you are not used to it.

Sorry you didn't get anything but it sure sounds like you had a good time and realize what hunting is really and truly all about. You really hit the nail on the head with that!

I am very fortunate to have good elk hunting very close to where I live. My wife and I both got elk (cows) on opening morning and so the freezer is really full and we are grateful for that. Elk are pretty special as is elk hunting. Too bad the one that got shot ended up getting away. It is a horrible feeling but unfortunately it does happen. Too bad he couldn't have gotten a broadside shot. That shot with any animal facing you is a pretty easy one to have something go wrong. It is also amazing how tough these critters are

Anyway, thats for the trip report. I really enjoyed it!!!

[Wetdog]

Great report, OS. Now you know why I live in Colorado, where the beauty and solitude is less than an hour's drive away. You could have used one plentiful resource to stanch the bleeding when you sliced your thumb: snow. Jam the thumb into a huge snowball and the bleeding eventually stops or slows to a tricle.

[Fishwhenican]

[ QUOTE ]
You could have used one plentiful resource to stanch the bleeding when you sliced your thumb: snow. Jam the thumb into a huge snowball and the bleeding eventually stops or slows to a tricle.

[/ QUOTE ]

Good hint. Cutting yourself in the woods is a drag. A buddy of mine ended up with 4 stitches in his thumb this year after slicing open his thumb dressing out his wifes buck deer. We usually try to carry some kind of first aid kit and I even know guys that carry suture kits and have sewed up their own cuts! Yikes!! Taking out stitches fine, I have done that more than once but putting them in. Not for me!!

[Dominic]

wow, cool trip report, OS...more please.

[BCPVP]

Great report. I wish I could hunt all week instead of just opening weekend. Damn school!

[bennyhana]

Nice job OS.

Here's my cold weather hunting tip. Sleeping bags don't warm the body, they trap body heat and keep the air between your body and the bag warm. DON'T SLEEP IN YOUR CLOTHES!! All the guys laugh at me when I wake up in my underwear, but I laugh at them when they say they were cold last night. [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]

You are absolutely right, there is more to hunting than harvesting an animal. I've got memories worth more than any elk steak, or deer rack. (Although shooting a 320lb bear was pretty cool. [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img])

Next time you pass through GJ, drop me a line.